The background description provided herein is for the purpose of generally presenting the context of the disclosure. Work of the presently named inventors, to the extent it is described in this background section, as well as aspects of the description that may not otherwise qualify as prior art at the time of filing, are neither expressly nor impliedly admitted as prior art against the present disclosure.
IPMI is an industry standard for system monitoring and event recovery. Currently, BMC chips fully support the IPMI Specification version 2.0 (hereinafter the IPMI v2.0), which is publicly available from INTEL CORPORATION, and is incorporated herein by reference. The IPMI v2.0 provides a common message-based interface for accessing all of the manageable features in a compatible computer.
Under the IPMI architecture, the Intelligent Platform Management Bus (IPMB) communications protocol defines a byte-level transport for transferring IPMI messages. Further, IPMI defines three types of standardized system interface that the system software uses for transferring IPMI messages to the BMC. The three IPMI system interfaces include the keyboard controller style (KCS) interface, the system management interface chip (SMIC) interface, and the block transfer (BT) interface.
In addition to the system interfaces and IPMB, IPMI messaging can be carried over other interfaces such as a local area network (LAN), serial/modem interface, Intelligent Chassis Management Bus (ICMB), and peripheral component interconnect (PCI) management bus. IPMI includes a communication infrastructure that supports transferring messages between these interfaces as well as to the BMC.
Currently, BMC vendors use BMC hardware which supports at least one of the system interfaces as described above. With tremendous growth of cloud infrastructure and low cost server market evolution, BMC vendors are seeking solutions to provide the BMC with a low cost alternative to the system interfaces and a method of transferring IPMI messages from the host to the BMC in a faster way.
Therefore, an unaddressed need exists in the art to address the aforementioned deficiencies and inadequacies.